I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for performing data detection and decoding in a communication system.
II. Background
A communication system may utilize multiple frequency subbands for data and pilot transmission. These subbands may also be called tones, subcarriers, bins, and so on and may be obtained with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) or some other modulation techniques. With OFDM, each subband is associated with a respective subcarrier that may be modulated with traffic data or pilot. Pilot is data that is known a priori by both a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter typically sends a pilot to allow the receiver to estimate the response of the communication channel between the transmitter and the receiver.
A communication system may not utilize all of the available subbands for transmission. For example, a predetermined number of subbands at each of the two band edges may be used as guard subbands to allow the system to meet spectral mask requirements. No transmissions are sent on the guard subbands, and data and pilot may be sent on the remaining usable subbands.
The guard subbands typically have a negative effect on channel estimation since no useful information is sent on these subbands. A degraded channel estimate due to the guard subbands may adversely impact data detection and decoding for data sent on the usable subbands.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to account for the negative effects due to the guard subbands.